THE IMMORTALISTS, by CHLOE BENJAMIN, PenguinRandomHouse Publishing

If you were told the date of your death, how would it shape your present?

It’s 1969 in New York City’s Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.

Their prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in ’80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11, hoping to control fate; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.

A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.

MY FIRST GLIMPSE!:

Four siblings, all very different from each other, seem to secretly have the same desire, to get away from what they call home and find their own path to a life fated by a prediction of death given to them as children.

Within a Jewish community, two sisters, opposites, grow up in the shadows of a future prediction of when they’ll die. One studies biology, one wants to perform magic. One goes to school and one chooses to travel to distant locations. Within that same community and family, two brothers, opposites in every way, also grow up under that same shadow. One chooses to be become a doctor, and the other, in fear of becoming his father, only wishes to live the gay life he dreams about.

So the question they must all ask, will the predictions of their deaths occur on the dates given them, and can they reach their dreams of the lives they want to live before their time runs out?